Stump

Neil Welliver made this untitled painting of a tree stump sometime in the twentieth century with oil on canvas. There's a real sense of the slowness and duration of time as a process in this painting, you can see it in the way the layers of green and brown build up the surfaces. The paint is applied in visible strokes, kind of blocky and square, like the image has been translated from one medium to another, almost pixellated. Look closely at the top of the stump; the moss is rendered with such care and attention that the surface almost seems to have a life of its own. It's this tension between abstraction and representation which I find so compelling - Welliver is doing something similar to what Fairfield Porter was up to in his landscapes; finding the extraordinary in the ordinary. The painting isn’t just about a stump; it’s about the act of seeing and representing.